by Gill Pringle
Nobody could accuse Icelandic filmmaker Baltazar Kormakur of being typecast.
From his breakout 2000 Icelandic romcom 101 Reykjavik through to US action thriller Contraband with Mark Wahlberg; buddy cop action comedy 2 Guns with Denzel Washington; action biopic Everest with Jake Gyllenhaal and Jason Clarke and survival drama Adrift with Shailene Woodley and Sam Clafin, his films rarely share a common thread.
Branching out even further, he undertook his first action horror film Beast with Idris Elba in 2022 and today, exploring new ground with his epic romantic drama Touch touching on the same territory as The Notebook.
Spanning several decades and continents, Touch tells the story of an Icelandic widower and restauranteur Kristofer – recently diagnosed with Alzheimers – who sets out on an emotional journey to find his first love, Miko, before memory fails him.
The story takes Kristofer from London where he was a young student working in a Japanese restaurant and back again to Iceland and then finally to Japan where he seeks out the young Japanese woman that he fell in with 50 years ago but who had abruptly vanished at the height of their whirlwind affair.
After receiving an early-stage dementia diagnosis at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kristofer leaves behind his Reykjavik home, hoping to solve the greatest mystery of his life.
Now, as panic about the virus spreads across the globe, Kristofer is on a quest to find his soulmate, resolving to follow her trail wherever it might lead – even back to Miko’s birthplace of Hiroshima – before his memories of their youthful connection are lost forever in time.
The seeds of the story were planted several Christmases ago when Kormakur’s daughter gave him Olafur Olafsson’s novel of the title.
“In reading Touch, I realised this was the love story that I had been looking for. It begins simply enough, with widower Kristofer searching for his first love, who disappeared 50 years ago.
“But as the story unfolded, I became totally gripped by the way author Ólafsson travels back through time and space to connect his readers to one of history’s most horrific events. By focusing on one couple whose love and life together was lost as one of the million consequences of a long-ended war, the book explores how trauma from conflict can impact generations to come.
“I appreciated the gentle way he told this tale – without finger-pointing and polarized viewpoints. I thought it was a great reminder how catastrophically things went wrong at the end of World War II and how close we are to repeating the mistakes of the past. Having grown up in the shadow of the Cold War, the atom bomb was a constant threat. I am not sure younger generations understand its dangers and repercussions, as we did.
“As I am probably mostly well known in the U.S. for bigger films of the action and survival genres, audiences might see a dramatic love story as a departure for me. But the fact is that I started my career as an actor and a stage director and my early Icelandic filmography includes black comedies, dramatic thrillers and character-driven dramas, often focusing on family.
“I had heard many real stories about people looking for a lost lover or a loved one in the later parts of their lives. Even Egill Ólafsson, who plays old Kristofer in Touch, told me that his mother divorced his father to find her first love, with whom she then spent the last years of her life. That fact made the film’s narrative all the more real for both of us.
“Having been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, Egill’s physical and mental state made shooting Touch more complicated, yet it only ended up deepening the journey. Realising that Egill has some of the same health issues as his character, we chose to embrace his condition and push through any challenges. Working with Egill was an absolute delight: his body might have grown tired at times, but the artist inside Egill stayed young throughout, filled with boundless creative energy.
“Kristofer’s story connected with me on many levels. From my own experience, I know that things one might do early in life – out of inexperience or lack of thoughtfulness or empathy – can come back to haunt you. The need for closure becomes a heavy burden. Hopefully, Touch can speak to both young and old, those who have lost love and those who are eagerly seeking to find it.
“I had been wanting to make a film where I could express interest in some way about my relationship with love, and this story had it all and also the intensity of falling in love when you’re young and then dealing with the consequences of having lost somebody that you haven’t had closure with,” says the filmmaker who also directed the International Oscar-shortlisted survival film, The Deep in 2013.
Kormakur pauses when you ask what his films might share in common. “I do love most of all to tell stories about people. I’m really interested in people and of course when you’ve gone through difficult times and some good times as well, then that makes it so much more interesting. There’s so much that you want to project into your characters and Touch provided a great opportunity to do that,” he says.
“And it’s not about like a crazy old man looking to reignite a love that he lost 50 years ago, not at all. It is about a man who is looking for closure. He knows there’s something out there that he needs to know before it’s too late. And that’s one of the things that drew me to it because, the older you get, the more there’s need of closure either with things you have done wrong to people or things that you haven’t really had the final act with.
“What I also liked about the book is the mystery that kind of allows for the time you need with these young people to see them fall in love. I didn’t want to do that in a contrived way, so it needed to have its time which I think holds the audience stronger to the story.”
Kormakur believes that he knows what makes for a good story, having worked for almost a decade with Iceland’s National Theatre during the 1990s, cast in one lead role after another.
During those formative years, he immersed himself with the works of the masters of theatre, working on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.
For the National Theatre, he also directed acclaimed revivals of classics such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and John Ford’s ́Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
As a filmmaker and owner of his own successful Icelandic studio, his work often reflects his own sense of wanderlust. “I’ve not chosen an easy life in the sense I want to be challenged. I love traveling in the highlands on my horses and I was a competitive sailor. I enjoy challenges. When I make films, I really like to go places and try things and learn and get to countries that I might not have a chance to otherwise visit.
“So, anything that gives me a challenge, I welcome, but also it needs to be for good reason. But it’s in my nature I have to say. It’s the way I am. Let’s put it that way,” he adds.
Ask Kormakur if there’s any other genres he’d like to explore, he leaps at the prospect of a western in his future. “I would love to do a Western but like Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, something in the vein of that, where the Native Americans are portrayed in a much more truthful way,” he says.
Touch is in cinemas 22 August 2024
